User experience lessons from a university dumping Blackboard

One university got so frustrated with Blackboard they finally ditched it. But this experience highlights a big problem with almost all enterprise software.
Human-centred decisions
One university got so frustrated with Blackboard they finally ditched it. But this experience highlights a big problem with almost all enterprise software.
It turns out Henry Ford never said that quote about faster horses. That’s not to say we shouldn’t pay attention to the sentiment of the quote, however.
Slides from my Edinburgh UX meetup talk on Monday 2 September 2019, about the user research we have been conducting around the needs of students and staff working with course materials digitally at the University of Edinburgh. See the more detailed blog posts about this project over at the Website and Communications team blog.
Your organisation really needs to value qualitative data more than it probably does.
Focus groups are probably the user research method that most non-specialists are familiar with. They are also still among the most common user research methods used. This, despite their many flaws.
I’ve had a great time over the past two days on the Service Design Academy’s user research bootcamp. These bootcamps are truly intensive. We were working with a live brief in a serious problem space.
It’s fashionable to dismiss rational choice theory out of hand. But contrary to what you may have been told, aspects of rational choice theory can still be helpful in understanding the world. And I find it a useful way to think about user experience.
Working on walls is an unbeatable way to create ideas as well as communicating them. But I learnt that lesson the hard way.
The University of Edinburgh is currently recruiting for four UX-related roles. I’m passing on the message because it’s an exciting time to be pushing forward with UX work at the university.
One of the biggest challenges designers face is avoiding bias. We all have perspectives that subconsciously affect our decisions. In the case of design, those choices we don’t even realise we are making can have big consequences.